Active History

An Historic Voyageur in Modern Times

November 19, 2012 1 Comment

By Jay Bailey

Early in my career as a French teacher in Manitoba, I took students to the Festival du Voyageur in St. Boniface, Winnipeg. There I was fascinated by the life and times, the strength, stamina and joie-de-vivre of the voyageurs. In addition, I was intrigued by the fact that the fur trade was dependent on the vagaries of fashion in Europe, the fact that our rivers and lakes line up more or less east-west, the native invention of the birch bark canoe, the willingness of young French Canadians, and later natives and Métis, to risk their lives in the trade, and the already well-established system of, and predisposition to, trade among the First Nations of North America. I was very impressed that, lacking any one of those factors, we would likely not have a Canada from coast-to-coast. Well supported by the Manitoba curriculum, les voyageurs, which focused on some of the most colourful characters in Canadian history, became my favourite teaching unit.

Upon moving to southern Ontario, I discovered that very few French teachers there knew much about les voyageurs. In 1990, a colleague asked me to bring the experience to her school. I jumped at the chance, and by the time I retired from full-time teaching in 2006, I had given more than 100 presentations at schools in and outside my own school board.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to live the life of the voyageurs. We got up, loaded the canoe and were on the water as soon as there was light enough to see we weren’t leaving anything behind. After 1500 kilometres and 61 days in birch bark canoes, from Ottawa back to Ottawa by way of Lake Ontario, Georgian Bay and the French River, paddling eight hours a day (wimpy by comparison to the 15-18 hours a day of the voyageurs), sleeping on the ground in a bedroll at night (groundsheet, two woolen blankets, oilcloth sheet overtop if the rain or the bugs were really bad), paddling, wading, lining or portaging canoes and all our period-correct equipment, cold pea soup and bannock to eat, flint and steel to make fire, I felt qualified to say I was an authentic voyageur. Among other skills, I know what to do without matches, dry wood, toilet paper or bug spray. Continue reading →

Towards a History of the Americas: Thoughts and a Podcast

November 16, 2012 No Comments

By Benjamin Bryce

Canadians frequently draw comparisons to the United States, but they rarely extend their gaze further south. Nevertheless, in a number of areas, Canadian history has been connected to that of several other countries in the Americas. For example, the Canadian government’s policies toward aboriginal people find many analogies in other parts of the Western Hemisphere. In areas ranging from land dispossession under the auspices of nineteenth-century liberalism to assimilationist education efforts driven by a civilizing mission, Canada stands beside Chile, Peru, and Mexico almost as much as the United States. In addition, the idea that an emergent network of public schools would promote civic cohesion and ethnic homogeneity in the late-nineteenth century links Canada not only to the United States but also Argentina.

Canadians’ interest in and reaction to mass migration in the early-twentieth century integrated the country into larger North American system. Yet just as playwright Israel Zangwill coined the phrase “the melting pot” in his 1908 play, elites, politicians, and educators in Argentina and Brazil articulated very similar ideas. Zangwill’s protagonist proclaimed that “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming.” It is indeed revealing that José María Ramos Mejía, a prominent Argentine intellectual and politician, made similar references to crucibles and racialized European ethnicity when he declared in 1910, “It is in the school that we can find the necessary strength to melt and amalgamate the different races that are constantly flooding the country.”
Continue reading →

The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Research, and the Public

November 14, 2012 1 Comment

The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 34 Isabella St., Toronto. Photo by Don McLeod.

By Donald W. McLeod

Next year will be the fortieth anniversary of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), which began as a single filing cabinet in the Toronto office of the newsmagazine Body Politic, and has grown into a dynamic organization. We presently have a volunteer board of nine members, a paid general manager, seventy volunteers (forty of whom are very active), and an annual budget of about $170,000.

Since 2009 we have been located in a heritage house at 34 Isabella Street, in the heart of downtown Toronto and the gay village. Unfortunately, the house on Isabella isn’t nearly large enough to house all of our collections, so we also rent a 2,000-square-foot storage space in a modern office building at 65 Wellesley Street, about four blocks away.

When it began, the CLGA was a “total archive,” collecting all manner of items that might be of potential interest to LGBT research. Our focus was on Canada, but we also collected internationally. We have archival accessions of the papers of individuals and organizations, a library, vertical files for ready reference, photographs, artwork, posters, moving images and audio collections, and artifacts such as banners, matchbooks, and buttons. We are particularly strong for the era of gay liberation, which in Canada dates from 1964 to the 1990s. Continue reading →

Archives and Social Justice

November 14, 2012 No Comments

Verne Harris (right) and Tim O’Grady at the 2012 Archives Society of Alberta conference. Photo courtesy of the Archives Society of Alberta.

By Tim O’Grady

In 1993 Verne Harris, a records management archivist at the South Africa State Archives Service, discovered some junior officials in the transitional Apartheid government had been told by the state’s security secretariat to destroy certain classified records in contravention of the nation’s Archives Act. After official efforts proved fruitless, Verne told a journalist, as well as the NGO Lawyers for Human Rights, and provided them with supporting documentation. Not only was this a breach of professional practice but it broke the Protection of Information Act which carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The South African government was taken to court and admitted violating the Archives Act. As a result the wide-scale destruction of public records ceased, and the saved documents became an important part of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation process.

This is a dramatic example of where archives and social justice meet, and is a fitting introduction to Verne Harris. In 2001 Verne left the National Archives of South Africa and began working for NGOs. He is currently the head of Memory Programming for the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

I got the chance to meet Verne when he facilitated a workshop with Terry Cook and Wendy Duff called “Archives for Social Justice,” a precursor to the Archives Society of Alberta conference in April 2012. The workshop and conference gave me the opportunity to think about the implications of social justice in archives and archival practice. Continue reading →

Remembering the War of 1914

November 13, 2012 5 Comments

Vimy Ridge Memorial – Dedication Ceremony

By Jim Clifford

It is very strange to celebrate the start of a war. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we have done here in Canada over the past year. The War of 1812 spanned from June of 1812 through to February of 1815, but this did not stop our government from starting their celebrations of the “Fight for Canada” during the 200th anniversary of the first months of the war. Perhaps they felt the need to keep the schedule open to celebrate the start of another war in 2014.

Canadians commemorate the end of the First World War yearly on Remembrance Day (November 11th), and with memorials, from Vimy Ridge to village cenotaphs. These monuments and sites of remembrance generally bring a somber tone, focus on the sacrifices of war and provide limited space to celebrate the glories of victory.

I hope that any additional events and publicity will bring the same tone, but considering the fanfare for the War of 1812 and the historically dubious claims that we stood side by side and “won the fight for Canada,” I worry that we’ll face an even bigger celebration of Canada’s role in World War One. The United Kingdom government recently announced plans to spend £50,000,000 to commemorate the war starting in 1914 and the Australian government has budgeted $83,500,000. Assuming the Canadian government will spend a similar sum of money, the question remains: Which First World War will we commemorate? Continue reading →

Crumbling Communities: Declining Service Club Membership

November 12, 2012 1 Comment

By Krista McCracken

Members of Royal Canadian Legion, Grand Bend, Ontario. Photo by CaseyLessard. Creative Commons License.

Declining membership rates, halting revenue and the sale of historic buildings. The media’s focus on Remembrance Day has brought the struggling state of Royal Canadian Legion membership into the light once again. Ontario Legion membership has declined almost 15% in the past 5 years and many previously vibrant branches have closed their doors or relocated to more affordable locations.

This decline in Legion membership can be at least partially attributed to the aging World War II and Korean War veterans. Many older veterans have passing away and there simply is not the same number of new veterans. However, veterans from recent wars are simply not flocking to their local Legion like their predecessors did.

This decrease in membership isn’t unique to the Legion. Many service clubs such as the Lions Club, Orange Lodge, Elks, Kiwanis etc have all seen a similar decline. Each of these service organizations has a unique history. However, service club membership as a whole has tended to wax and wane based on political, economic and social conditions of the era.

Continue reading →

Experimenting with Victorian anthropometrics: What can we learn from past scientific practices?

November 8, 2012 No Comments

Descriptive poster of Francis Galton’s anthropometric laboratory. From Karl Pearson’s The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914-1930), vol. 2, p. 358. Reproduced by permission of the Wellcome Library, London UK.

By Efram Sera-Shriar

Imagine yourself as a nineteenth-century naturalist living in Britain. You are working on a project that seeks to examine differences (both cultural and physical) between the various peoples of the world. You want to collect information from distant locations scattered throughout the globe, but you are unable to travel abroad because of vocational and familial obligations at work and at home. To compensate for your inability to travel afar you send instructive questionnaires to people living in different regions asking them for their help. Your hope is that by using a complex network of informants to collect your data you will be able to use the material for substantiating your research claims.

For much of the nineteenth-century this was one of the most effective ways to collect data for scientific research. There is a lost art to creating and maintaining these informant networks, and Victorian researchers worked tirelessly at building strong rapports with their correspondents. In my new research project I aim to recreate a scheme to collect anthropometric information on people living throughout the world. By using some of the practices of nineteenth-century naturalists, it is my hope that I will better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their research programmes. I am interested to see what historians can learn by doing a kind of Victorian experiment. At the crux of this project is a desire to see if historians will be better situated to understand the kinds of problems these nineteenth-century researchers experienced as they attempted to collect their data. Continue reading →

Swimming Against the Current: Sexual Citizenship After Harper and Homonationalism

November 7, 2012 4 Comments

By Steven Maynard

This is the first in a series of posts originally presented as part of a roundtable entitled “What’s the Use of History? Citizenship and History in Canada’s Past and Present,” held in Toronto on October 16th 2012. The event was organized by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project.

Mark Tewksbury Speaking at the Suncor Energy/COC Partnership Announcement Event in Calgary on February 22 2012. Source: iwilldreambig Flickr Photostream.

In Canada, “we let our gay people swim.” So quipped Justin Trudeau, would-be PM with the good hair, when asked for his reaction to the Conservative government’s revised citizenship guide, Discover Canada. He was referring to the photo of Mark Tewksbury, the 1992 Olympic gold medallist in the backstroke and the guide’s only visual representation of gay/lesbian life in Canada. In drafting the new guide, staff at Citizenship and Immigration Canada had proposed including historical highlights of the gay/lesbian movement, from the 1969 decriminalization of homosexuality to the 2005 legalization of same-sex marriage. But the public servants’ political masters were not nearly so historically minded. As we now know, Jason Kenney, Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, ordered his staff to remove the references to gay/lesbian history and same-sex marriage, something Kenney had opposed in 2005.

The outcry was swift in coming. NDP MP Bill Siksay said “Jason Kenney can’t edit gays and lesbians out of Canadian history.” But the truth is he could and he did. Even after public pressure to reinsert the gay material, the new edition does not include the historical reference to decriminalization (perhaps it too readily evoked that other Trudeau) and the proposed paragraph on gay rights was watered down to a single sentence about how gay and lesbian Canadians enjoy equal treatment under the law, including access to civil marriage. This episode brings into focus the contested connections among history, citizenship and sexuality. Continue reading →

Beyond the Classroom: Taking a Large University Class on a Field Trip

November 6, 2012 2 Comments

By Britt Luby

At all levels of classroom instruction, history teachers are faced with the challenge of meeting the needs of tactile learners in an environment that favours auditory learners. Large classes – York University’s Keele Campus averages 57 students per class – mean that lectures remain the most effective means of relaying information. This year, I was assigned to TA for Professor Molly Ladd- Taylor’s popular course “Growing Up in North America.” Her success as an educator is reflected by high levels of enrollment. Ladd-Taylor’s class can boast close to 200 students. The success of her lectures can be tracked through student comments online. In 2003, one student exclaimed “Makes the material interesting, is very accomadating [sic], is very well structured in the [sic] lesson plan.” Consensus remained in 2012 when one student posted “Amazing lectures….Easy to understand, great, interesting!!!” Needless to say, I was thrilled to join Professor Ladd-Taylor’s teaching team. And, my excitement grew when Professor Ladd-Taylor expressed an interest in alternative learning methodologies and provided me with free range to design and develop a voluntary field trip. Continue reading →

Unpacking Public Opinion in Oshawa and Durham Region: A Tale of Two Polls

November 5, 2012 2 Comments

By Christine McLaughlin

Mark Calzavara, Christine McLaughlin and Gail Bates (Friends of Oshawa’s Waterfront General Meeting, 1 November 2012). Photo courtesy of Robert T. Bell.

I recently wrote about an ongoing struggle in Oshawa around the city’s waterfront – the federally-appointed Oshawa Port Authority (OPA) has approved an ethanol refinery at the harbour, despite longstanding local opposition. The battle over public opinion has coalesced around two polls conducted on this topic. The first, commissioned by the OPA, shows a majority in support of the ethanol plant. A second poll, commissioned by the Council of Canadians, shows a majority opposed to the ethanol plant. I was rather disappointed to read an “analysis” of this in a local paper that reached an immensely disappointing conclusion: “ignore both polls, demand accountability, answers.” There are many valid reasons why two polls can show contradictory results – none of these provide good reason to discount polling entirely, or to ignore any poll. There is no need to demand answers- they are readily available to us all if we just take the time to ask the right questions. Continue reading →

Last »